What's Good For the Goose....

I was cleaning out my email yesterday and came across an item I was hoping to talk about last week:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-1220-byrne-20111220,0,7120320.column

It's an Op-Ed article from the Chicago Tribune last week addressing the court battle over Congressional redistricting in Illinois. 

The State's Court of Appeals has ruled that even though the districts are clearly gerry-mandered and obviously drawn up to give one party an advantage in most areas--they are not unconstitutional.  Illinois allows the Legislature to draw up the districts--and the majority party pretty much gets to set the rules.

This may sound very familiar to those of us here in Wisconsin--where court challenges are being filed against redistricting maps approved by the Legislature this year.  "Evil" Republicans are accused of "disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters" by drawing them into new districts.  And if allowed to stand, the GOP will "unfairly" win a majority of districts for a decade.  What is different from Wisconsin is that it is Illinois DEMOCRATS that are "guilty" of the affront to election fairness.

Democrats control all three houses of government in Illinois (as if you couldn't tell by their outrageous increases in taxes and tolls) and they drew up their Congressional districts to get an advantage in 11 of the 18 races the next ten years.  What's more, as part of the legal process, the party was forced to release memos that revealed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee basically drew the lines--and the Legislative Democrats just slapped their rubber stamp on them.

I would hope that Wisconsin Republicans would hold up the Illinois example every time Wisconsin Democrats roll out their tired claim of being about "voting rights" and "fair elections" and "equal representation".  Because let's be honest--neither party has any high ground upon which to stand on this issue.